Given the headlines of the past few weeks—-earthquakes, tsunamis and nuclear near-disaster in Japan, war in Libya, stalemate in Washington—- it was unexpected that yesterday’s New York Times ” title=”article” target=”_blank”> article and remember that this is Hattiesburg, Mississippi that the writer is chronicling. The town where Vernon Dahmer was murdered for civil rights activism, where later to be lynched Medgar Evers headed the NAACP and not all that far from the town where fourteen year old Emmet Till was lynched for “flirting” with a young white woman in 1955.
As one of the inter-racial couples noted, “The times have certainly changed.”